Under bridges, in laundries, in a snow pile, volunteers encounter homelessness in Wausau

Feb. 2, 2013

Volunteers talk with a homeless man at The Salvation Army shelter in Wausau. / T'xer Zhon Kha/Daily Herald Media

Volunteer Jane Janke Johnson aims her flashlight at bedding that lay on a concrete abutment beneath the west end of the Scott Street Bridge in downtown Wausau. Editor's note: Daily Herald Media electronically blurred part of the photo to remove a profanity spray-painted on the concrete. / T'xer Zhon Kha/Daily Herald Media

By the numbers

In December, the North Central Community Action Program took a count of people staying in the area’s shelters. 17 — homeless people placed in a hotel through the action program’s emergency housing fund. 25 — familes and singles who stayed at The Women’s Community 25 — people who stayed at The Salvation Army shelter 19 — — people who sought shelter at Randlin Homes in Wausau

Volunteer Janet Horak, of Wausau, gets a safety vest on Wednesday night at the Parish Center of the Church of the Resurrection in downtown Wausau. Horak participated in the overnight Point in Time Count of local homeless people. / T'xer Zhon Kha/Daily Herald Media

Volunteers walk along South Second Avenue with a homeless man to find a room for him for the night at The Salvation Army shelter in Wausau. The man was rejected because he had already stayed at the shelter the maximum allowed nights. / T'xer Zhon Kha/Daily Herald Media

Volunteers walk with a homeless man along South Second Avenue in Wausau to find a room for him for the night at The Salvation Army shelter. / T'xer Zhon Kha/Daily Herald Media

More

ADVERTISEMENT

A January wind chilled the evening air to a biting minus 8 degrees as a group of volunteers descended beneath the west end of the Scott Street Bridge in downtown Wausau.

A flashlight illuminated a sobering scene. A white down comforter, a twisted blanket and a gray-striped pillow lay on a concrete abutment, just below the surface of a bridge that 11,000 drivers use to cross the Wisconsin River daily.

At first, no one said a word.

Janet Horak, a Wausau nurse who has come to the aid of the homeless in the past, took pause.

Then, “Wow,” Horak said. Her head shook and eyes grew wide as she thought about the moment. “All you can think is, ‘Someone, that was their stuff.’”

Horak was one of about 40 people who gathered late Wednesday to scour the streets for homeless people in the Wausau area as part of a citywide project called the Point in Time Count. They searched into the early hours of Thursday, encountering the occasional drifter or the evidence of people living outdoors or shuffling from one temporary shelter to another.

By daybreak, volunteers had found nine homeless people after searching under bridges and in laundromats, parking lots of stores that never close and parks covered in 6 inches of snow and ice. One person was found sleeping in the foyer of a business; others were found walking the streets. Two were women. Some were struggling with mental health issues or had battled substance abuse. Two said they were military veterans, and one was living in what volunteers described as a man-made snow cave. The group distributed plastic bags stuffed with fliers for the Wausau Warming Center that opened Friday, a granola bar, a voucher for McDonald’s and a voucher for a haircut to any homeless person they encountered.

Officials from the North Central Community Action Program will report the number of homeless people volunteers found to the federal Housing and Urban Development Department. That department, in turn, will help determine whether Marathon County is eligible for funding to sponsor housing and homelessness initiatives.

(Page 2 of 4)

'I could do nothing'

Wausau Police Officer Nate Stetzer on Wednesday drove Horak and another volunteer, Michelle Henry of Wausau, around the city for the count in an unmarked sports utility vehicle. He expected volunteers would find someone — or someone’s bedding — sprawled out over public spaces because he’s seen them there before.

In the past, he had found a mother, father and their teenage daughter curled up under the Scott Street Bridge and recalled spotting the girl’s ratty, pink stuffed teddy bear there once. The patriarch of the family, Stetzer said, often was drunk, which meant that the family could not seek refuge in local shelters that ban alcohol and intoxicated people.

“To know I could do nothing was the hardest thing,” Stetzer said.

Stetzer, 23, was hired on to the patrol unit in July after spending the first four years of his police career on bike patrol. He found several homeless people in the city’s parks while on bike patrol, he said, and he knows some by their first names.

He often handed out his phone number, he said, and offered help in finding the homeless jobs, but none ever called him for assistance.

Stetzer continues to hand out his business cards less regularly these days, he told volunteers Wednesday night as they scanned Isle of Ferns Park near downtown Wausau at about 11:30 p.m.

Some homeless people, it seems, don’t want help, he said.

“(Homelessness) is a whole different world,” Stetzer said while he looked under the bottom of a bridge in the park.

At about midnight Thursday, Stetzer thought he found another chance to help.

The volunteer group had checked in at the Rainbow Laundromat on Third Avenue, a place known to attract late-night squatters, just moments before a man with filth-blackened fingers and leathery skin walked in to use the bathroom.

Laundromat encounter

“I didn’t do nothing wrong,” the man said when he caught sight of Stetzer, dressed in a black beanie and a brown hunting jacket.

The man went to the bathroom, came out and after about five minutes of small talk with Stetzer, the officer asked, “Do you have a place to stay tonight?”

(Page 3 of 4)

“No. I want a roof over my head; I do,” the man said, tossing both hands in the air and taking a seat at one of the laundromat’s cafeteria-style tables. That’s when he agreed to take the Point in Time Count Survey.

Through the survey, Horak learned the man is 54, stocks shelves during the third shift at a local grocery store, and dropped out of high school two weeks before graduation to work at a Christmas tree farm.

He has been homeless, he said, for a year. Stetzer later said the man has been wandering the streets of Wausau for a few years.

The man, dressed in a long winter coat and blue coveralls, shot out his leg from under the table, pointed to his snow boot and told Horak about his “black, wet toe” from walking. He rarely stops walking, he said, even for sleep.

“I try to go up to the library and get a couple of z’s in there,” he explained.

While the other volunteer with Stetzer that night handed the man a goodie bag, the young officer was pacing the laundromat, punching numbers in his cellphone to find a place for the man to sleep that night.

“Can I make your night?” Stetzer asked the man.

Stetzer thought he could get the man an emergency housing voucher for a local hotel or persuade The Salvation Army shelter to take him in for the night, even though he had stayed at the shelter the maximum allowed nights already. The Salvation Army places limitations on how long a person can stay at the shelter once that person has completed a 90-day program with the shelter.

The man walked out with Stetzer toward the outside of the laundromat and plucked out a backpack and a white, plastic grocery bag with a pair of shoes from his “hiding spot.” The pair and the two volunteers trudged three blocks through the snow-covered sidewalks of Wausau’s west side to the backdoor of The Salvation Army.

He couldn’t get in. The Salvation Army wouldn’t grant the man an exception, and the local hotel had banned him. The man started walking away from the shelter, with a facial expression that said he was not surprised.

(Page 4 of 4)

“What will you do?” Horak asked.

He would walk to work on the far west side at about 1:30 a.m., and after work, he’d pick up a free cup of coffee from a community center at 5 a.m. After that, he planned to walk around the mall or visit the library or, maybe, both.

The volunteers set back to the laundromat with the man, and Stetzer handed him a pair of black, nylon mittens. They thanked the man repeatedly for taking the survey. In the parking lot of the Rainbow Laundromat, everyone shook hands. Then, they walked away.

'Plenty of work to be done'

Volunteers had found proof — bedding under the bridge and a man with a blackened toe at the laundromat — that when temperatures dip and the sky turns dark, some people in Marathon County have nowhere to sleep indoors.

“Wednesday night was a pretty rotten night. It was very cold,” said Jeff Sargent, a volunteer and director of the North Central Community Action Program, a nonprofit organization that works to solve housing problems in the area. “I’m not sure we thought we would see someone who was buried in a snow cave. I think the numbers point to (the fact) that there’s plenty of work to be done.”

He estimates as many as 100 people are staying in the county’s shelters on an average night. Sargent said he expects more volunteers will find even more people sleeping on park benches or picnic tables when a second count is taken at the end of July.

Knowing details about who and how many in the county are homeless will help members of the United Way of Marathon County’s Housing and Homelessness Coalition, which launched in August, determine what type of aid the area’s nonprofits should offer to the homeless, said Christine Ellis, a collaborative associate for the United Way.

“Gathering the real-time data is going to help us so much (in) understanding that there are people really experiencing this housing challenge,” Ellis said.